Unlock the Power of Design Tokens with Contentful Studio
Design tokens are the backbone of your design system, capturing all the essential design decisions that define your brand and product. Contentful Studio, our solution for visually assembling pages, now incorporates a token system that can be another touchpoint for your design tokens. This advancement allows for more streamlined and cohesive design workflows.
What are design tokens?
Design tokens are fundamental in encapsulating design decisions used within your design system. From colors to text styles, borders, and animations, design tokens cover a wide range of elements that define your brand identity. Typically stored in JSON files for flexibility, design tokens can be transformed and applied across different platforms using transformation packages. Building a robust foundation of reusable tokens ensures consistency and efficiency throughout the design system.
Types of design tokens
There are three main types of design tokens: primitive, semantic, and component tokens.
Primitive Tokens: These are the basic building blocks of design tokens, encompassing a select few key elements that align with your brand identity. Creating a robust palette of primitive tokens is crucial for maintaining consistency and coherence across all design assets.
Semantic Tokens: Semantic tokens carry meaning and guidance, specifying how and where design tokens should be applied. By embedding design rules within semantic tokens, designers and developers can easily interpret and utilize these tokens, ensuring consistency in design execution.
Component Tokens: Component tokens are specific to individual components and refer to semantic tokens. These tokens allow for customization of components based on specific design requirements, such as theming scenarios and unique styling preferences.
Building out your design token system
A robust design token system starts with defining your primitive tokens, such as primary brand colors, and expanding to include variations, gradients, and feedback colors. By structuring your tokens into semantic tokens and component tokens, you can provide clear guidelines for how colors, typography, and other design elements should be applied.
Distributing and applying design tokens
Transforming and distributing design tokens across various platforms and tools is essential for maintaining consistency in design execution. Using tools like Style Dictionary and Knapsack, you can automate the process of exporting tokens into usable code formats, such as CSS, Swift, and Figma variables. This streamlined approach ensures that designers, developers, and content creators can easily access and apply design tokens in their respective workflows.
Embracing themes, modes, and token collections
Themes, modes, and token collections are essential components of a structured design token system. Themes allow for distinct variations of design tokens across different brand identities, while modes enable adaptive designs based on specific contexts, such as light and dark modes. Token collections group related tokens together based on how modes are applied, ensuring consistency and coherence in the design system.
The future of design tokens and AI
Advancements in design tools, such as Figma and Tokens Studio, have revolutionized the way design tokens are implemented and applied within design systems. AI is poised to transform the design process further, making it easier to scale and customize design systems rapidly and efficiently. With a solid foundation of design tokens and a systematic approach to applying them, AI can enhance and amplify the capabilities of your design system, leading to more efficient and innovative design workflows.
Experience the Power of Design Tokens with Contentful Studio
Ready to take your design system to the next level? Schedule a personalized walkthrough of Contentful Studio and see how our solution can help you unlock the full potential of design tokens in your design workflow.